Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

If you have every used CSVDE and exported Active Directory objects, you’ve noticed the integer that represents time. Last logon time is one such value that is represented as this integer. There is a way to convert it to time and date that is human readable.

Making sure mail is sent properly from a PHP website is a bit difficult when it’s not your server, like shared hosting. You never have access to the mail logs, so you can’t see mail moving. I host several websites on shared hosting and recently found my CMS was not sending emails to me. So I opened a ticket and I concluded it to be a SNAFU.

I had just finished working on a project where I needed to programmatically get a web page and save the HTML to a file. I started toying around with some code I used for parsing XML and totally rewrote the code. I found that I kept getting an error of “Microsoft VBScript runtime error: Invalid procedure call or argument”. I couldn’t understand what was going on. I was passing the parameters correctly to the File System Object, but I kept getting the error. All FSO was doing was creating a file and writing the string out. So I checked the length and then started writing the left(string,number) and found it was a character that was in Unicode. So I wrote a Unicode to Ascii function that is not all that efficient, but it is very effective. The sample code below will get a webpage from Google and save it to a file.

Recently I needed to extract a links from a web page; normally I would use some Linux commands ported to windows and get the job done. In the end I needed to format the relative link to a full URL, so I decided to use Excel. However when I imported the web page into excel I found that the URL was embedded in the friendly name of the hyperlink.